


ruptured and incomplete

by togglemaps



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Grief/Mourning, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ramsay is His Own Warning, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 00:03:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15107558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togglemaps/pseuds/togglemaps
Summary: Jon had died and returned from death, held a lover in his arms as she died, faced down armies made up of wildlings and wights and White Walkers and Ramsey fucking Snow, but Theon Greyjoy had only needed to say his name to shake something loose inside him, to make him feel like the same green boy who’d rutted with Theon at Winterfell all those years ago.Set post That Scene in 7x04.





	ruptured and incomplete

**Author's Note:**

> I originally started writing this for droughtjoy2017, but then it got super long on me and I got distracted by other things and I finally decided to finish it and edit it and do all those annoying things to it like. Two months ago. And it's done, you guys, it's done! 
> 
> Honestly no idea what to warn for with this one. Just, you know. What you'd expect for these guys in the situation I guess. If you think I should have warned for something that I didn't, drop me a comment and I'll add it. As mentioned, it's set during/post 7x04, in that vague period of time after Theon arrives on Dragonstone and Dany gets back. It's probably precisely as handwave-y about time as the show is tbh.

He brooded long into the night, through to the early morning and then well into the following day. 

Brooding was something Jon had been doing since he was young enough that others called it sulking. He’d often been told it wasn’t his best quality and that was something he couldn’t deny, as he sometimes grew so bogged down inside his own head he couldn't shake himself loose. His mind would trap him if he let it, no less than the dragon queen had trapped him on this thrice damned island. 

This, though, was something else. This was simply brooding over past hurts that had never healed, some that never could be healed. Rickon would never return from death and neither would Robb. The feeling of heaviness in his chest was as much a knot of grief as it was a physical sensation that made him want to bang at his sternum until it dissipated. 

He could never unsee Rickon’s dead body lying on that field, could never unknow what it was to place his body in the crypts beside all the Starks that had come before him. He hadn’t cried and neither had Sansa. He had felt as though something inside his chest was trying to crawl up his throat and out of his mouth and had sat on the floor of his room afterwards, trying not to choke or gag while wondering if some awful creature had followed him from wherever dead men went and had waited til now to show itself. 

The feeling had passed and left him feeling foolish. It had simply been his mind, caught in a trap of its own making once again. 

Seeing Theon on the beach had hurt in a way that had shaken him, had made him want to rage at the other man and comfort him all at once. He’d wanted to throw Theon to the ground, sneer and yell and scream and yet also to soothe him and tease him gently until he smiled, even if only for a moment, even if it didn’t look the way his smile once had. 

Jon had died and returned from death, held a lover in his arms as she died, faced down armies made up of wildlings and wights and White Walkers and Ramsey fucking Snow, but Theon Greyjoy had only needed to say his name to shake something loose inside him, to make him feel like the same green boy who’d rutted with Theon at Winterfell all those years ago. 

Theon looked so different now, worn and tired and and thin and haunted somewhere behind the eyes. Jon had seen that look before, on men in the Watch, on wildlings beyond the Wall, on Sansa the day she rode into Castle Black. He looked like he didn’t sleep, the bags under his eyes so dark and deep it felt like Jon could wipe them away with soap and water. Jon didn’t sleep much anymore, but he didn’t feel it either, one of those things lost to him since he opened his eyes on that table at Castle Black. 

He knew that tiredness was a strange thing to miss, but it was one more thing that separated him from every other person that walked the earth, another thing that made him more wight than man. 

Days later, Jon sat in the dining hall of Dragonstone, drinking mulled wine and trying to let it warm him, warm the places inside of him that had been cold as the dead since Melisandre had returned him to life. 

It was far too much to ask of mulled wine. 

The Ironborn ate on the other side of the room to the Northmen, but it wasn’t hard to find Theon, who ate a little seperate from his men. In spite of everything, all it had taken was a glimpse of Theon to awaken something he’d thought left behind in the nothingness. 

In the year that had passed since he rose, he had felt no lust, no stirring of any physical need of…that sort. He blushed just to think of it and he wanted to scowl, to somehow force the blood from his cheeks—he was a man grown, a king, and yet still reacted like a green boy about such things. Theon would have laughed, once. Ygritte, as well. 

His heart beat and he drew breath into his lungs, but his body knew, knew he had been dead and rose again. Fear didn’t move him as it once did, and he had no sense or feeling of hot or cold or even warm or cool. He’d badly wrenched his shoulder while sparring at Winterfell and had felt the pain only dimly. He'd had to trust the Maester to tell him when it was safe to spar again, the pain such a small thing he could have destroyed his shoulder for no reason at all. 

Would his skin have to blacken with frostbite before he noticed the cold? Would he faint from the heat before he felt it at all? 

Compared to all that, the missing lust was nothing. He hadn't missed it, had barely thought about it. He knew that other men would have been angry at its loss, but he’d felt better for its lack, clearer and surer. 

He knew that some would be concerned if they knew any of it, so he told them none of it. He had never been one to share his burdens anyway, not with anyone except for Sam, and he was in Oldtown. 

(There were other reactions that he knew were possible, though he tried to avoid thinking what they could be. Fear. Disgust. Horror. Awe. He still remembered the way the men stared at him after he rose. If he lived to be a hundred and never saw such a look ever again, it still wouldn’t be long enough to banish their faces from his mind. He saw them in his dreams, the way awe and horror and fear all joined together to make an expression that disturbed him even now. It was a look that wrenched his humanity from him, tried to make him something other than a man.) 

Jon sat and waited until all his men were gone, waving away Ser Davos and watching Theon stare at the table as the other Ironborn left the dining hall. It was three mugs of mulled wine before everybody had left the dining hall except for the two of them. It was only then that Theon finally looked up. His eyes were shadowed and hollow, distant and cold and so very blue. Jon had stared at the narrow sea that very afternoon, thinking of Theon’s eyes and how Jon had always known they were the colour of the sea. He’d never seen the sea before going to White Harbor all those months ago, but he’d always known anyway. Theon had once commented that a girl in Winter Town had the sea in her eyes, back when they’d both been young, and Jon had known immediately what he meant. 

Theon had the sea in his eyes. Darker now, a stormier sea than they had once been, but the sea they remained. 

His eyes flicked away from Jon, unable to hold his gaze, and turned to the windows. The days were getting shorter now, even this far south, and the sun had gone down and torches lit all around them. The flickering light made Theon appear even gaunter than he had on the beach, less lost and more like some creature from beyond the Wall that men had forgotten long ago. 

Jon stood and walked over to Theon, sitting opposite him and wondering what one said to an old lover who had betrayed one’s brother and stormed their old home, had left it gutted and destroyed. 

Gods, he had loved this man or, at the very least, loved who this man had been so long ago. Was that man as dead as the boy Jon had been? From all he knew of Ramsay, he seemed the sort capable of killing a man while his heart still beat, the sort of man who was made more of cruelty than anything else. 

It wasn’t the same as knife piercing flesh and your heart ceasing to beat and feeling the life drain out of you and then. 

Then. 

Nothing. 

Nothing, until you awoke alive and aware and changed. 

It wasn’t the same, but it was the closest Jon had yet seen. “How are you?” he asked. 

Theon turned his head towards Jon, his eyes fixed low. It was a strange look, if only because Theon’s back was straight and his shoulders back, like the Theon that knew Jon was fighting with the Theon that didn’t. “I understand you’re a king now. The King in the North,” Theon said. 

A spasm ran across Theon’s face, a quiet horror that made Jon want to look away, want to shy away from the man they both thought of every time somebody said that particular title. When Daenerys had said the last King in the North had been Torhem, he had wanted to spit at her. Robb had been the last King in the North and he had been murdered by his fellows, murdered while a guest under Lord Frey’s roof. 

He was dead and it cost her nothing, nothing, to acknowledge Robb. It gnawed at him still and a voice in his head that sounded like Sansa scolded him for it. Be practical, it said. We will remember Robb, what does it matter if the dragon queen doesn’t? 

“I am,” Jon said. “I didn’t choose it, but if the North wishes me to lead them through the winter, then I will.” 

Theon blinked, slow and somehow sad, and then he grimaced. “Robb didn’t ask for it either.” 

Jon tried to swallow past the lump in his throat. Robb was dead and speaking of him…it hurt just as much as avoiding saying his name. It just…hurt. Robb was dead and it hurt that it was true. He stared down at the table, searching for something else to say. “I understand your father is dead. I’m sorry.” It wasn’t entirely truthful, but it was what one said either way. 

“I’m not.” 

“What?” Jon said, shocked. Theon had been so upset about his sister, he had assumed…

“My father was….he wasn’t a man you loved, not if you had any choice. Or he wasn’t a man I would have loved, if I’d had any choice. He looked only to the past and could only take the Islands back there. Or try, anyway. Yara is the future. He lived for a time when he was a king and his sons still lived and the walls of Pyke had never been breached, but that time has long since past.” The longer Theon talked, the more slurred his voice became. He had been drinking the mulled wine too, but he had eaten less than Jon and with how thin he was, the wine would have hit him far harder. 

“You didn’t love your father?” 

“Of course I loved him,” Theon said, annoyed. “Weren’t you listening? But he never had any use for me. He had an heir and a spare and I was beneath his notice and then I was gone. When I returned, I was too Northern for him.” He smiled, bitter. “I’m sure you understand the irony.” 

Jon did. Theon had never fit in at Winterfell, always been a landlocked sailor far from the sea. It had been everything about him at first, but he’d never conformed enough for anyone to forget he didn’t belong. He’d spoken the Braavosi form of Valyrian when he’d arrived, but Jon and the Stark children learnt Old Valyrian from Maester Luwin and Jon could still remember the naked frustration on the boy’s face as Luwin scolded and snapped as though Theon were simply being difficult. He’d been beaten more than once for rudeness that he clearly hadn’t seen as anything unusual, been beaten for things that even Jon would not have even been scolded for. 

“I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t. I see now that I should have, but I…I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back to being a prisoner.” Theon laughed, short and high and sharp and bitter. “Isn’t that funny? I couldn’t go back to being a prisoner and then…it turned out my cage had been gilded all that time. Lord Stark’s sword hanging over my head all those years, but…Lord Ramsey’s knife.” His eyes were dry, but he let out a quiet sob that was somehow also a laugh. “I should have died with him. With Robb. It would have been better if I had.” 

Jon had thought the same thing about himself. _If I had gone south, maybe…even if we had died, it would have been together, as brothers._ He had even wondered if Theon would have stayed with the Northern army if Jon had been there, arrogant as the thought was. 

It had been so easy to forget Theon had been a prisoner at Winterfell. Jon wasn’t certain he’d ever known it, not truly, not as he’d known Theon was an outsider just as Jon had been. 

They sat in silence for a long time, until Theon stumbled to his feet and left. 

 

There was still little to do but brood. Tyrion was away with the queen and Ser Davos was coordinating the mining effort, so Jon, well, Jon brooded. He watched Theon in the dining hall and then wandered the halls at night. He didn’t sleep much these days, though he never felt anything worse than simple tiredness, nothing like the exhaustion he’d felt manning the Wall against the Wildling’s attack. Sometimes he’d see the light of a hearth fire burning bright underneath Theon’s door while he walked the halls, but he never knocked, never did anything except stand and stare from as far as he could and still see it. 

Jon was eating a late breakfast of cheese and bread and cold, boiled eggs when Theon sat beside him. There were only a few other men in the dining hall, all the queen’s men, and they weren't near them. 

“I heard from one of your men…that—that Lord Ramsay is dead.” Theon sat slumped forward, his eyes on the table, his voice a quiet mumble. 

Oh gods. Jon should have told him, should have taken him aside one of these useless days and told him. He’d assumed…well, he’d assumed that Theon would assume. That he’d know that Ramsay had to be dead because they’d retaken the North. But that wasn’t true, was it? People escaped from battles all the time, even battles they lost badly. 

“Yes,” Jon said. “I’m so sorry you found out that way. I should have told you.” It wasn’t that Sansa spoke of Ramsay often, the opposite really. It was the way she spoke around him, how she spoke of Theon with such fierceness, of how the household at Winterfell barely spoke at all, of their limps and missing fingers and eyes that looked just as Theon’s did right now. He still remembered a woman who had looked right at him and said, “It was too good a death for him. He murdered my daughters. You should have given him to us.” 

“He’s truly dead,” Theon said. 

“Yes.” 

Theon bent even further toward the tabletop and Jon wanted to wrench him backwards, rearrange him to sit with the arrogant, elegant sprawl that had always annoyed Jon with the way it had made him want to stare, to look and look and look until Theon looked back. 

“You saw the body?” Theon asked. 

“Yes. We burnt him, with the rest of the dead.” No one in the North was to be buried in the ground, not until this was all over. It hadn’t been a popular choice with all the men, but it had been the right one. They had burned Rickon’s body before they buried him and there was still some part of him that thought Sansa hated for it, though she’d expressed no such thing. 

“How did he die?” 

“Sansa killed him. His dogs—he hadn’t been feeding them. They were…very hungry.” 

Theon turned his head toward Jon, his brow furrowing. “His dogs. They were loyal to him.” 

“They’re dogs. Even a man would turn on his own brother if he was hungry enough.” 

“You’re certain he’s dead?” Theon asked, desperate. 

“Oh yes,” Jon said, his voice hard and pleased and terrible. 

Theon shook his head, his breathing coming in short, harsh gasps. “It can’t be true. Lord Ramsay—he was more than a man.” 

“No, Theon. He wasn’t.” 

They sat in silence for a long time, until the queen’s men had left. Once the door closed behind them, Theon turned into Jon’s body and rested his forehead on Jon’s shoulder. “He’s dead, he’s dead, he was just a man,” Theon whispered. “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.” 

Jon put his hand on Theon’s knee and squeezed and they sat like that until the servants came to prepare the hall for lunch. Jon watched Theon awkwardly pull himself to his feet, limbs stiff from sitting in the one position for so long, and leave, silent and hunched and quick as he could manage. 

 

The next day he found Theon in the library, sitting at one of the tables with six or seven pieces of parchment sitting around him, the ink drying as Theon wrote another. They were all cut to size for ravens and, for the life of him, he couldn't think who Theon could possibly be writing. Sansa, maybe? But why so many? 

He hovered in one of the vast libraries many corners for a long time before he sat beside Theon. “Who are you writing?” he asked. 

Theon’s sleeves were rolled up just a little, revealing no more than a third of his forearm, but even that small patch of skin had more scars than even a man like Jon was used to seeing all in one place. There were wrinkled burns and flaying scars, the burnt skin sometimes having been peeled away in patches, and one oddly precise square on his left arm still smooth and unmarked. Jon wanted to reach out and touch it, but he folded his hands in his lap instead. 

“My mother,” Theon replied. 

Theon had a mother. Of course Theon had a mother; everybody except Jon had a mother. 

He couldn’t picture her though, couldn’t picture Theon with a mother who dotted on him or sat with him when he was ill. She must have been something like that, for Theon to send her letters even now. 

Theon had written the occasional letter home at Winterfell, but they’d been few and the replies even fewer. If Theon’s mother was so precious, why had he written so rarely? And why hadn't she written him? He wanted to ask all those questions, but he didn't, just sat and watched Theon write in his neat, precise hand. 

“Ask,” Theon said. 

“What?” 

“Others may struggle to read you, Jon, but I know what that look means. You want to ask something and aren't sure you should. So ask.” 

He ducked his head. Sansa was the same with him these days and he wasn't used to it at all. Ygritte had assumed that all his looks had something to do with sex and Sam had just asked question after question until he understood what Jon was thinking or Jon grew irritated enough to snap at him or walk away. 

Robb had been like Theon and Sansa, more perceptive than Jon liked, who preferred to keep his own mind private. The thought pained him, as thoughts of Robb always did now, the thoughts quickly turning to all the ways he'd imagined Robb’s awful death. He had dreamed of Robb’s death the night before, felt an arrow pierce Robb’s breast like it was his own, felt a knife slicing through his own neck, seen them attach Grey Wind’s head to Robb’s body. 

He told himself they were merely dreams, but every thought of Robb as he had been led to Robb as he had died. It was exhausting. Horrifying. 

Yet to not think of him felt a betrayal to a man who had never treated Jon as less than a true brother, as less than any of their other siblings, who had loved him and Jon had loved in return. 

Jon wondered if anyone ever managed to hold the memory of the dead close and still continue on. The memory of Ygritte pained him no less now than it did a year ago and the same was true of Robb, of uncle Benjen, of his father, of Arya. He had thought of them all so often when he’d been at Winterfell, without the liberation of the North to preoccupy him. He had been nothing but ghosts and worry at home, always strangled by one or the other. 

It was Theon who made him think of Robb more than the others. He tried to clear the lump from his throat. “You're close to your mother?” he asked, digging his fingernails into his palm in the hope that some small pain would banish Robb from his mind. 

“I was.” 

“Not anymore?” 

Theon's thumb beat a nervous rhythm on the desk, his face settling into a sad look that Jon wanted to wipe away. Once, Theon never would have allowed anybody to see him sad, would have smiled so convincingly that even someone who knew him well would struggle to know if it was genuine or simply mimicry. Now, Theon's face fell into misery like it was a familiar thing, the lines deepening around his eyes and mouth and forehead into craters made of grief and horror. 

“She’s…very sick,” Theon said. “The death of my brothers…it haunts her.” He grimaced. “She asks for me, day and night. When I was there, sometimes she knew me, but other times…I’d never truly hated your family before, but sitting with my mother…” He smiled bitterly. “I hated them. I hated you, I hated Robb, I hated each and every one of you, and Lord Stark most of all. My mother didn’t deserve to have her third child taken from her in as many months. She didn’t deserve any of it.” 

“No,” Jon said softly. “I’m sure she didn’t.” Something wrenched in him, something deeper and more terrible than any muscle. 

This pain he could feel. This pain was no further away now than it would have been all those years before, at Winterfell. 

It soothed him, small a thing as it was. 

He was a man still, and could feel as a man did. 

 

Theon sat on the sand, staring out over the sea. When Jon had seen him from atop the cliffs, he’d hesitated. Surely it would be better to leave him be, leave him to his own thoughts. Theon hadn’t sought Jon out even once while they’d both been at Dragonstone and this would be the third time that Jon had gone to him. 

Still, he walked down the path to the shore and told himself that he hadn’t already made the decision. That he could walk back up the path rather than talk to Theon, that he could even walk in the other direction when he reached the bottom as though his only want was simply to walk, enjoy the sea and the breeze that came off it. 

When he reached the bottom, he did neither of those things, just walked straight over to Theon and dropped down to sit beside him. “Hope I’m not bothering you,” he said, in as neutral a voice as he could manage. 

“No,” Theon said. “It’s a pleasant change to have someone around who doesn’t despise me.” Theon tensed. “Or, at least, I assume you don’t.” 

“No,” Jon agreed. “I don’t. Maybe I should. Maybe I should hate you, even. Sansa wouldn’t want me to do that, though. I don’t think—” He faltered, unable to force Robb’s name through his lips.

Theon nodded. “It’s kind of Sansa, to forgive that. And it’s kind of you to think—” Theon fell silent. It was too much for him, as well. For all she had suffered, Sansa was still alive. It pained him no less to think of Arya or Rickon. It was different than thinking of father or even the uncertain fate of Uncle Benjen. They had been grown men all of Jon’s life and he’d always known that it was right and proper for him to outlive them. They had died too young, too shockingly, but their deaths weren’t some strange, unnatural thing. 

“He—he would’ve forgiven you, I think. He loved you. Even when I didn’t understand why, he loved you.” _That I can say,_ he thought. _If not his name, then that._

He snorted. Perhaps Theon, too, was thinking of those early years, before they were both older, when they had thought each other unbearable. An arse, Jon had called him. Theon had a more colourful way with words than Jon, not so much restricted to simple statements as complicated phrases. Boring, he might’ve said. Upjumped, too proud bastard, he had said. 

“You were always so good,” Theon said. “I hated you for it, even when—even when I didn’t. You were—I never understood how it was possible. You were supposed to be a bastard and—the first time, I was so pleased I’d brought you down a little. Gotten you down in the mud with me. Gotten a little muck on your irriating perfection. I didn’t even think—I’d never been in love before.

“You were good,” Theon repeated. “Pure. You still are.” 

Theon was almost smiling, a look that was once so familiar and now seemed strange, almost forced and unnatural. Then, Jon had been the solemn one, the one who rarely smiled, who said little, who spoke more with actions than words. Now, Jon spoke far more than Theon did and had a far less solemn face. 

This almost smile though. It brought it flooding back, with more ease than Jon thought possible. 

He hadn't known what he felt was love when they'd been together at Winterfell, had only known it later. He hadn't wanted to know it, because he'd known what people would say if they knew. 

They'd say he did such things because he was a bastard, because the lowborn have unnatural wants and desires and the weakness to act upon them. Lowborn filth, they’d say, with the base desires that went along with it. He knew now that such things weren't true, but when he'd been young he'd thought so many things true that weren't. 

He had loved Theon. Loved him still, as he still loved Ygritte, but nothing like that was ever simple for him. He couldn't just find a woman to love as others did—he had to love a Wildling or a caustic hostage with more fear in him than anyone Jon had ever known. 

He looked away from the almost smile, from Theon’s now solemn face, from everything about Theon that reminded him of Before, of the life they’d lived at Winterfell that was gone forever. Winterfell itself was different now, parts of it burnt beyond repair or recognition, parts of it standing brand new and strange against the outline of the castle that existed in Jon’s mind. 

They were men truly now, and that time of their life was not simply over, but dead. There was nothing to be done either way—Winterfell as they’d known it was gone. Robb was dead, Rickon was dead, father and Lady Stark as well. More than that, they were changed. Jon wasn’t certain the boy who’d been in love with Theon would even recognise the man that Theon had become, or even the man that Jon himself had become. 

He cupped the back of Theon’s head gently in the palm of his hand, his thumb gentle brushing back and forth over his skull. Theon turned to look at him, the smile becoming more, becoming bashful and a little shy, his eyes soft. Jon could almost see the boy he’d been in his face, weathered and thin though it was. 

He leaned forward to kiss him and Theon flinched away so violently that he fell back onto the sand. Theon lay frozen for what seemed like a long time, but was surely only seconds. Then, he stood, brushing the sand off him thoughtlessly, while murmuring, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was visibly trying to cut himself off, as though the words were coming from some place inside him that he didn’t control. He fled. 

Jon sat in the sand for a long, long time. The sun was setting by the time he finally managed to force his stiff, unresponsive limbs to move. Everything hurt—his back, his legs and his shoulders ached and his healed wounds throbbed as they hadn’t done in a long time. His head swam, telling him to stay where he was, to lay down in the sand until he felt better, but he’d been sitting there for hours and it hadn’t passed. It was like the motion sickness he’d had in the boat for the first few days until he’d gotten his sea legs. See Davos had given him hard candy to suck and chew until the feeling had dissipated, but he didn’t have anything like that here. 

He walked slowly up to the castle, waiting for the feeling to pass. When he woke up the next morning it was gone and in it’s place was a sunken pit in his chest that felt like nothingness, like death itself. 

It followed him from Dragonstone, stayed with him beyond the Wall and as he lay in a boat knowing that death clung to him still, even though it continually refused to keep him. It stayed with him in King’s Landing, stayed with him as he tried to feel something other than this with the kind of desperation he had only ever felt while battling the Bolton army outside Winterfell. 

It was a mistake. He felt that even as he kissed her. It was beneath him to use her that way, to use anyone that way. 

If only Theon could see him now. He’d understand how wrong he’d been about Jon all this time. There was nothing good or pure in Jon anymore, if there even ever had been.


End file.
